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The American Prospect - articles by authorenDreamers Without Bordershttp://prospect.org/article/dreamers-without-borders
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Europe is in shambles: France sleepwalking, Germany in a tailspin, the euro falling, the left in disarray. Now, just weeks after the defeat in France and Holland of the innovative new treaty that was supposed to usher in a new constitutional era for an enlarged Europe of 25 nations, terrorist bombings in London are reinforcing the politics of fear and lending fuel to the contention that individual nations should reclaim control of their borders from a porous European Union. </p>
<p>The treaty that seemed a sure thing eight months ago went down hard. Its advocates claimed it was at once more pro-business and more progressive than the old one. With its new declaration of rights and social measures, it supposedly embodied a social-democratic vision for Europe such that most left elites had embraced it, just as the libertarian <i>Economist</i> had often ridiculed it. But at the same time, it promised a free-market Europe that business approved of and conservatives like Jacques Chirac could campaign for. </p>
<p>Yet among the voters the treaty was supposed to beneﬁt, it evoked disdain. It was defeated in France (by 55 percent) and annihilated a few days later in Holland (by 62 percent). Tony Blair quickly bailed on a planned British referendum, and the polls on the upcoming vote in Poland (now delayed) dropped 20 points. Gerhard Schröder took the defeat in May of his red-green coalition in North Rhine Westphalia (where the Social Democratic Party had ruled for 40 years) so hard that he moved up elections by a year and is in danger of being displaced by Angela Merkel, the Christian Democrats' new and untested leader who hopes to become Germany's Margaret Thatcher. “No” is Europe's mood today.</p>
<p>Of course no one really said “no” to the proposed constitution. Who had even read it, with its 4-inch thick compendium of technocratic legalese and opaque compromises? It was as long as Proust and far less engaging. Ordinary citizens said “no” to the elites on the left and the right who had dumped this incomprehensible but vaguely threatening mess on them (Chirac could have had a safe parliamentary vote on it but opted for the popular referendum). </p>
<p>Voters said “no” less to the new treaty than to their fears of what it seemed to stand for. After all, in the early decades of the EU they had been enthusiastic supporters of what in America would have seemed radical ideals of pooled sovereignty, European-wide social policies, and open borders. Led by great socialist statesmen like Jacques Delors, the French stood at the forefront of a new Europe. </p>
<p>So when, in June, so many socialists voted against their leaders (including Delors) and said “no” to an enlarged and seemingly unaccountable Europe -- despite the new declaration of rights, a new focus on participation, and new institutions intended to enhance democracy -- they seemed to be turning their backs on their own idealism. When they said “no” to a feared onslaught of “Polish plumbers” (newly enfranchised eastern European workers who would steal their jobs), they seemed to turn from hope to despair. When they said “no” to Turkish membership in Europe that would dilute their national identities with Islamism (even though Turkish membership is at least a decade away and uncertain, even had the treaty been affirmed), they seemed to react to new forces that have emerged only since the fall of the Berlin Wall. And when they said “no” to lying elites -- <i>Le Nouvel Observateur</i> put Chirac on the cover with the headline “The Last Crook” -- they announced a crisis of faith in their own leadership.</p>
<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>To some extent, much the same thing happened last year in the United States. The left, faced with globalization, marketization, and the challenges of a malevolent interdependence, blinked, divided, and stumbled. The failure of American progressives to stop George W. Bush's unilateralist politics of fear is the same story of the French and European left's failure to stop the populist right's anti-European politics of fear. Although the European left had once staunchly supported a strong, integrated Europe, whereas the American left had been more ambivalent about international cooperation and more willing to advance the military option (think of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson), progressives today on both sides of the Atlantic seem bafﬂed, if not actually paralyzed, by the new realities of a malevolent interdependence.</p>
<p>In the face of economic globalization, the left everywhere is suffering from schizophrenia, torn between its egalitarian economic instincts and its reactionary cultural fears. Many economic egalitarians are simultaneously cultural separatists. Many progressives endorse democracy “for us” (us French, us Americans) but not “for them” (those Algerian immigrants, those undocumented Latino workers), at least as long as <i>they</i> refuse to play by <i>our</i> cultural rules and to live in accord with our religious values. For ordinary Americans, globalization is OK when it comes to buying ﬂat-screen TVs, iPods, and SUVs, but not when it comes to bleeding our industries and undermining our way of life. Progressives have not ﬁgured out how to turn this conundrum into a convincing affirmative politics. </p>
<p>In Europe, populists on both the left and the right were beset by doubts about hyper-multiculturalism and the treaty's compromise decision to omit any reference to religion or to the Christian origins of Europe. American economic populists were divided about gay marriage and the seeming banishment of religion from the American public square, evident in the removal of the Ten Commandments from courtrooms (the recent Supreme Court decision won't help much) or in the (re-)excising of the word “God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.</p>
<p>The ambivalence about globalization and the populist response to it ended up splitting progressives on both sides of the Atlantic between me-too neoliberals opting for markets without frontiers (but let's have a modest safety net) and fearful union protectionists opting for stronger frontiers (but let's sustain the rhetoric of global fraternity). Obviously the stories in Europe and the United States vary in tone and pitch, and Europe's class politics still exercise a hold on the left's imagination in Europe that has long since vanished (if it ever existed) in America. Moreover, Europe began with an openness to notions of pooling sovereignty and creating new transnational institutions that the American left has never imagined.</p>
<p>But when today Lou Dobbs embraces the Minutemen patrolling the Mexican border as patriotic vigilantes to keep out the “illegals” drawn into the United States by market forces, he plays on the same fears the Dutch populist right manipulates when it turns once tolerant burghers into critics of what they see as a Dutch “multiculti” disposition run amok. When Jean-Marie LePen in France or Jörg Haider in Austria or the heirs to Pim Fortuyn in Holland castigate freeloading immigrants trying to cash in on the European welfare state even as they disdain its Christian and civic traditions, how like Pat Buchanan they sound. When small businesses in the taxi and plumbing trades complain that they cannot compete with the cheap labor of workers from new EU members in eastern Europe, their cries for higher walls and more subsidies echo the cries heard in America among steelworkers and garment-makers who wonder how long their jobs will survive before the ﬁrms employing them simply pick up and move out of the country.</p>
<p>In Europe's referenda, the politics of fear is now trumping the politics of hope with which the treaty's less-than-compelling compromises were hammered out. Yet this was mainly a failure of elites, who put the constitutional cart before the political horse, assuming that a technocratically compelling reform document would commend itself to frightened citizens no longer convinced that “Europe” represented their best interests. Dutch, French, and Danish nationals feel like they are being invited to surrender their national sovereignty, and before a democratic Europe is constituted, one that might popularize and legitimate genuine European popular sovereignty. The elites and their mythmakers reading their own broadsides don't get it. Not here and not there. Citizens are not doing what they are supposed to do. Time, as Bertolt Brecht once wrote with bitter irony, to elect a new citizenry.</p>
<p>French voters took a long, hard look at a Europe being shaped by the forces of neoliberal globalization and shrank back, just as a slender plurality of Americans -- confronted with the choice between a world at the mercy of transnational institutions like the United Nations and uncertain allies like Germany and France and a cowboy president willing to use unilateral force -- opted for Bush. For potentially progressive rank-and-ﬁle voters on both sides of the Atlantic, the choices being offered vis-à-vis globalization are simply not palatable. Embrace market anarchy and let global Darwinism -- its successful productivity and its disastrous inequality alike -- determine the future; yield to a plundering productivity and hope you can get yours. Or build new walls against global anarchy but shut off the future and pretend away the brute realities of interdependence. Go with the ultraliberals or succumb to ultranationalists. </p>
<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>No path offers progressive or democratic responses to the challenges of interdependence. But facing the choice of giving in to a world dominated by market and corporate forces they neither understand nor control or walling themselves inside the old sovereign communities they identify with, many ordinary citizens opt for the latter. After all, the Nazis were “national socialists” -- economically progressive socialists whose fears and resentments were shaped by fear-mongers to reactionary ultranationalist purposes.</p>
<p>Readers of <i>The American Prospect</i> know that there are viable civic alternatives to these toxic extremes, but the debates among intellectuals rarely translate to the real choices offered by the political parties or their blinkered, one-issue-at-a-time policy wonks. And even in our progressive journals, as in <i>El Nouvel Observateur</i> or <i>Liberation</i> in France, <i>El Pais</i> in Spain, or <i>La Repubblica</i> in Italy, progressive conversations remain parochial and insular, restricted to the usual suspects.</p>
<p>In Europe and America, then, the defeats for the democratic left are about the democratic deﬁcit that issues from globalization's tough challenges. Democracy, the left's strength, is at stake because the rules of a global market seem to moot national choices to pursue diverse paths, and the left cannot seem to ﬁgure out an appropriate democratic response to globalization. For Europeans, this means being forced to choose between embracing Europe as an ultra-market (rather than a civic and democratic entity) or resisting Europe (by falling into the clutches of the neonationalist populist right). For Americans, it means choosing between embracing globalization (at the cost of embracing global inequality and insecurity) or affecting to “stop globalization” (and choosing xenophobia and isolationism). Neither option offers equality and justice for Americans or others. We need an entirely different menu of choices.</p>
<p>The right, of course, has no such democracy problem, for its ideal is liberty, not equality, and the sustaining of productivity and proﬁt, not the securing of justice. It trumpets authority, discipline, and leadership and regards democracy as a formally representative system where citizenship is conﬁned to occasional elections. It privileges private liberty and property over public equality and justice and prefers to leave their balancing to markets. It equates citizens with consumers and thinks that the latter can do the work of the former. </p>
<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>What is missing is an afﬁrmative approach to globalization that accepts its inevitability but insists on its transformation. If progressives do not ﬁnd a way either to democratize globalization or to globalize democracy, they will be defeated again and again -- either by the neoliberal center or the populist neonationalist right. For starters, American progressives and European leftists need to deepen their all-too-episodic conversations and broaden them from the rhetorically minded World Social Forums to a substance-centered permanent engagement. Michel Rocard and José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero need to talk with Eliot Spitzer and Antonio Villaraigosa. François Hollande needs to be in regular conversation with Howard Dean. Jack Lang needs to instant-message Cornel West. And that's just the Atlantic, a narrow Europe–U.S. conversation that should open the way to discussion and collaboration with Latin American, African, and Asian progressives.</p>
<p>All the challenges progressives face are challenges of a world of interdependence. Corporate elites understand this and, with their client states, have their economic forums and Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, and the World Trade Organization, a k a WTO), plus the common agendas to prove it. But the left remains reactive rather than affirmative, parochial rather than cosmopolitan, knowing what it is against (globalization) rather than what it is for. The realities of global interdependence -- which include AIDS, weapons proliferation, climate change, technology, inequality, rules for economic markets, and, of course, terrorism -- deﬁne the politics of nations today. These realities will not be addressed one country at a time, nor will they be kept at bay by raising walls. They demand common strategies, close collaboration, and global cooperation. Until the left starts talking across frontiers, it will remain the party of losers without frontiers, defeated again and again by neoliberals and neonationalists -- neither of whom are democrats. </p>
<p>There is no going back. Interdependence is our destiny, though for now it is mostly a malevolent interdependence of AIDS and global warming and predatory markets, of corporate anarchy and nihilistic jihad. Either the left constructs a new politics of benevolent interdependence or it backs itself into the “no” corner, where all it can do is complain about what it can't stop, eventually opening the door to the politics of <i>ressentiment</i> and fear.</p>
<p>An affirmative approach to globalization, by deﬁnition, cannot be done one party at a time, one nation at a time, one desperate people at a time. The power of anarchic globalization is that it enforces a race to the bottom, setting this nation's worker against that nation's worker. The cost of protectionism is that it allows French farmers to ﬂourish only if African farmers suffer. There can be no justice in one nation, no security in one nation, no prosperity in one nation. Interdependence mandates collaboration. </p>
<p>Why must globalization belong to corporations when interdependence can also belong to civic organizations, people's movements, and citizens without frontiers? But progressive globalization cannot happen without political leadership. Global democracy means access to, and control over, global power.</p>
<p>The task, then, is to offer progressive solutions to the challenges of interdependence that draw citizens out of their parochial identities but do not run afoul of cultural, moral, and value concerns that attach citizens to those identities. How to accept and even embrace diversity without overly diluting identity? How to root cosmopolitanism in a scary world of permanent change? A true conundrum.</p>
<p>Here are a few suggestions about strategies and solutions, at least as a starting point for a transnational progressive conservation:</p>
<p>
</p><li> Develop a political strategy to make the democratic use of the IMF and the WTO a feature of national political campaigns. These global ﬁnancial institutions are technically “democratic,” subject to the control of their member nations; if those nations choose, they can be used to leverage social justice and, say, develop global labor, consumer, and environmental standards as a condition of loans. The left today tends to vilify these organizations. What if progressive leaders in the major nations demanded that they be turned to progressive purposes? To do this would mean to put them on national political agendas and ensure that a progressive political victory in France, Spain, Japan, or the United States is also a victory for transforming the IMF and the WTO into instruments of global justice, with policies that promote social and labor rights instead of just property rights.
<p>
</p></li><li> Develop worker policies that require those who currently beneﬁt from undocumented workers to pay appropriate social costs. It is the market that draws workers across borders, whether legally or not, and it is the market that should bear the costs. Taxpayers rightly complain that they pay for the health, educational, and social services that undocumented workers incur. It is the corporations that beneﬁt from their cheap labor that should be asked to share the burden of these social costs. For too long we have privatized the proﬁts and socialized the costs of labor mobility. That must change by becoming part of a political agenda.
<p>
</p></li><li> Develop a framework for transnational unions that recognizes the differing stages of development of different national economies. Many of the race-to-the-bottom problems that confront competitive global markets today once deﬁned the Darwinist competition among the states in America, when nonunion low-wage states (often in the South) drew industries (and hence jobs) away from union states in the North (a problem for the enlarged Europe of 25 today). American unions are, at present, necessarily enemies of workers in Africa and Asia. Wage parity is not possible, but an international wage scale cognizant of both developmental differences and the costs of compliance with safety, child-labor, and environmental standards would be less Darwinist than the current anarchic system.
<p>
</p></li><li> Support the proposal for a “Tobin tax” on international currency transactions, both to discourage destabilizing speculation of the sort that swamped Asian economies in the late 1990s and to raise funds to help pay the costs that developing nations incur when they try to meet environmental and safety standards imposed on them by developed nations that, in their time, never paid such costs.
<p>Redressing North-South inequality would inevitably involve some North-South wealth transfer, whether in the form of debt forgiveness, foreign aid, or other devices. Most current options pit developed-world taxpayers against developing-world workers. The aim should be to tax the companies and shareholders who most beneﬁt from global markets and, by shifting the direct burden off taxpaying workers in the developed countries, turn them into the allies of the developing world.</p>
<p>We need a politics of interdependence that does not pit cosmopolitanism against rooted moral beliefs. The right has prospered by claiming, falsely, that to be tolerant, democratic, and cosmopolitan is also to be a moral relativist, an enemy of individual liberty, and a stranger to patriotism. Religion is not the enemy of democracy but, as Tocqueville showed, the necessary foundation for political liberty and civic diversity. There is a tradition of patriotism -- Jürgen Habermas calls it “constitutional patriotism” -- that is not only compatible with but absolutely indispensable to democracy. There is no reason for the left to be at war with religion; there is no clash of civilization between democracy and belief. Faith and reason have always been partners in the most stable and tolerant democracies.</p>
<p>These approaches are not easy sound bites. And it is the right that ﬂourishes in times of fear and danger because it favors the simple over the complex, the easy over the hard, the values that divide people over what might bring them together. That is why progressives have such a hard time ﬁnding their voice on talk radio, where derision and exclusion work better than deliberation and inclusion, or on the infotainment media outlets, where getting people's attention is much more important than doing something with it. </p>
<p>Yet it is also true that in the ineluctably interdependent world in which we live, neither the anarchy of ultraliberal markets nor the provincialism of ultraconservative nation-states is likely to meet the challenge of surviving inequality, anarchy, and terrorism, let alone of securing justice and comity. In this, the advantage goes to progressive democrats. But only if we learn to do democracy across borders. Only if we can ﬁnd a way to give a home to others in the world without surrendering our own. Only if we ﬁnd ways for an engaged citizenship to trump passive fear, and use what we can achieve together across borders to overcome what we do to one another when we are separated by fear's intimidating walls. </p>
<p><i>Benjamin R. Barber is the Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland. He is the author of 17 books, including Jihad v. McWorld.</i></p>
</li></div></div></div>Mon, 18 Jul 2005 01:44:32 +0000144699 at http://prospect.orgBenjamin BarberNeither Consent nor Dissenthttp://prospect.org/article/neither-consent-nor-dissent
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">A</span>s President Bush rushes headlong into war with Iraq, there are endless reasons for concern; but the one that is most disturbing has been least remarked on. The president can be faulted for waiting so long to consult Congress, the United Nations, America's allies and the Middle Eastern nations likely to be affected (Jordan, Turkey, Iran). And he certainly can be faulted for rashness, impetuosity, arrogance and an impressive indifference to the rule of law -- even if, in the end, he is compelled to play by the UN rules that, ironically, he himself invoked. But accountability is a two-way street, and Americans should be equally concerned with their -- make that <i>our</i> -- dramatic failure to register in politically relevant terms the unease (if polls are to be believed) that we putatively feel about an Iraq invasion. </p>
<p>
A few passionate Democrats -- Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich, Paul Wellstone and John Kerry, and (finally!) Al Gore and Ted Kennedy -- along with a handful of Republicans including Chuck Hagel and Dick Armey (!) have been audibly remonstrating with the administration. But the Democratic Party leadership has been working more to <i>change</i> the subject rather than to join the debate. More significantly, though there have been a few petitions and full-page ads, none of the national interest groups and social movements that might have an interest in slowing the rush to war has been heard from.</p>
<p>
Where is the women's movement? Sitting out the debate because certain varieties of fundamentalist Islamics belittle women? And the unions? Angry with free-trade liberals and third-world sympathizers who disparage textile and steel subsidies and refuse to feel their pain at jobs hemorrhaging abroad? What about the civil-liberties lobby? More interested in protecting those rounded up without warrant in the war on terrorism than protecting us from an unwarranted war? And the Greens? Oblivious to the connection between the oil lobby and the war lobby? And, again, where is the leadership of the Democratic Party? Playing the same election politics it accuses George W. Bush of playing by mortgaging its civic conscience to a desperate gamble that if it can give Bush his war it can get Americans to focus on the economy again?</p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">W</span>hat's going on here is an unhappy convergence of trends that predate both the war fever and the Bush administration. First, there is a certain lassitude that appears to have resulted from the well-publicized erosion of social capital that Robert Putnam spent the last decade regretting. Putnam's chief worry was the impact on Democratic activism by citizens, and these worries now seem well-founded. The bridges and connections that link people locally are no longer as effective as they once were. Folks who neither eat nor pay nor learn nor pray together are not easily mobilized around national political debates.</p>
<p>
Lassitude is also a consequence of several decades of privatization ideology that has made government programs and public philosophy suspect even to liberals. If you can't trust government and you can't trust politics, then why bother to try to act? If markets are more efficacious than government institutions and consumers more powerful than citizens, there is no point in trying to change public policy. At best, we can boycott a war we don't approve of, but we can't stop it. </p>
<p>
Political cynicism has been building for decades on the liberal left. It peaked with that toxic combination of policy compromises and personal scandals that engulfed the Clinton administration. Why does Jason Mark of the activist group Global Exchange seem so down on political action? Why does Andy Burns of the 180/Movement for Democracy and Education insist that "no one sees any real change coming out of Congress," leaving himself without a political strategy? (Both were quoted in <i>The American Prospect</i>'s Oct. 7 issue.) </p>
<p>
Cynicism is not only dispiriting, it is demobilizing. People who think their votes don't count -- or, as in Florida, don't even get counted -- are not prospects for political action. The liberal left seems particularly vulnerable on this score, in danger of simply collapsing under the weight of too much rapid change, too many counterintuitive issues, too much business-friendly Democratic Leadership Council centrism and too few electoral victories that, when they have come at all, have come at too high a price. Like the neoliberals it reviles, the left often appears to have given up on government, and on democracy itself. </p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">A</span>s things stand, if the president goes to war, then he is likely to go without eliciting either the consent or the dissent, the support or the opposition, of the storied American majority, more silent today than ever before at a moment when the raucous contestation of democratic deliberation is desperately needed. Progressives will blame the president and his Cold War veterans and his corporate honchos, but this won't wash. </p>
<p>
We have to admit our own democratic complicity in the outcomes that our choices -- or our disengagement -- produce. The term-limits movement, for example, suggested a deep distrust by voters not of politicians or of the system but of voters themselves. Like an alcoholic hiding the bottle from himself, the American voter pleading for term limits seemed to be saying: "I don't trust myself! Don't let me do it -- unless I'm legislatively blocked, I may just go off the wagon and vote for the same stupid SOB I voted for the last three times!" In fact, we already have "term limits" -- they are called elections. But we no longer trust ourselves to discharge our civic responsibilities prudently or effectively. It's the same with the preoccupation with a constitutional limit on spending; the constitutionally authorized limit is Congress itself. Except we don't trust it to do what we want, or -- more to the point -- we don't trust ourselves to want what we supposedly should want. </p>
<p>
This profoundly disturbing democratic distrust of democracy, this self-loathing tendency not to trust ourselves to act aright or even know what's right, is a form of moral disarmament -- and one that further empowers a president beset by no such doubts (and willing to enact his convictions at the drop of a hat). When the popular sovereign hesitates and falters, "the sovereign representative" is empowered to act as it will. </p>
<p>
Our reticence to jump into the fray amounts to a full-scale retreat from politics. Nothing could be more dangerous -- not even the war itself. For the president to strike preemptively against a nation, however detestable its government, that has not attacked America is certainly an affront to the rule of law and a radical shift in American principles. But for those who know better and who oppose preemption to look on in truculent silence is an affront to democracy and a radical shift in our tradition of popular dissent. A people that abjures its own responsibility to judge those it elects, that alienates its own right to oversee and, where necessary, blocks imprudent acts by its representatives, is a people that has yielded its sovereignty. </p>
<p>
The people of Iraq are not to blame for the despicable deeds of Saddam Hussein (one reason for not making war on them to remove him). He rules by brute force and intimidation, which is precisely our complaint about him. But we the people of the United States are fully responsible for George W. Bush and his deeds; that's what it means to live in a democracy, Florida and the Supreme Court notwithstanding. (That's another liberal cop-out; closely contested elections are also part of our system.) When the Iraqis and other enemies of America say, "We have nothing against the people of the United States, we are hostile only to its government," they project their own powerlessness on us, misjudging our culpability by reflecting on their own lack of responsibility. There is a world of difference, however. In a democracy, we are responsible for what our government perpetrates in our name, and we can and should be regarded as culpable for the consequences. Otherwise, there is no accountability, hence any democracy (which is more or less what the cynics are saying). But unless we are willing to join the America-bashing zanies who see no difference between the United States and Iraq, who insist America, too, is a "terrorist" state, we must acknowledge the president's preemptive unilateralism as our own. </p>
<p>
President Harry Truman hung a sign in the oval office declaring, "The buck stops here." He had it half right. Finally, it is the sovereign American people who need to insist, "No, Mr. President, the buck stops with us."</p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">L</span>et's be clear: I am not appealing here to false consciousness, trying to suggest that while Americans appear to support the war they really don't or shouldn't.</p>
<p>
Despite President Bush's ongoing general popularity (hovering in the high 60s), and despite months of an all-out media campaign by the administration to make its case for intervention, a CBS poll in late September reported that four out of every 10 Americans thought Congress had not asked enough questions about the president's Iraq policy. Moreover, slight but real majorities continued to want the United States to follow the recommendations of the United Nations, preferring that a vote in Congress come only <i>after</i> UN approval has been secured. </p>
<p>
Polling is not politics, however. Registering opposition to a policy in private via a poll simply doesn't constitute citizenship. Contestation demands deliberation and information. The president once had to learn the names of foreign leaders and the geography of the foreign capitals from which they came. But how many Americans for or against the war can identify Iraq's neighbors or describe the geography and politics of the Kurdish minorities where the frontiers of Iraq, Syria and Turkey intersect? Can they tell us whether Saddam Hussein's "evil" lies in his being an Islamacist, a Marxist or a Baathist? Or what the difference is between the three? We tolerate ongoing popular ignorance in the domain of foreign policy more or less forever. When have presidential debates featured foreign policy? When has the evening news contained a quarter of the world events covered regularly by the British Broadcasting Corporation?</p>
<p>
The blip of interest after September 11 dissipated in an orgy of White House moralizing in which the need for us to think subtly about the world (Why did this happen? What was the context for terrorism? Are there indirect ways in which the United States contributed to the conditions that made terrorism an option?) was replaced by a simplistic demand that we judge it ("the axis of evil") and fix it (preemptive war). </p>
<p>
By conceiving of foreign policy as what America does <i>to</i> rather than <i>with</i> other nations, the U.S. government and its citizens are relieved of the need to know anything about our enemies (other than that we are superior to them) and anything about our friends (other than what they need to do for us). From the president on down, we have been exempted from the demands of historical complexity, political uncertainty and the gray zones where right and wrong, black and white, are insufficient guides to effective policy. The media cottoned to this easy (and ratings-friendly) line, reinforcing simplemindedness by turning foreign policy into still another installment of <i>Crossfire</i>: "Are you with the president or are you another flabby peacenik who still doesn't get what 9-11 was all about?" more or less defined the debate. </p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">T</span>his is not the place to argue the merits of going or not going to war -- although along with the realists (who include the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, as well as such conservative national security stalwarts as Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski), I am fully convinced that the argument against can be made on prudential and realpolitik grounds no less than on moral and legal ones. But there is also a case for war, even a case for preemption -- yet the debate between the two arguments has not been meaningfully joined in the media or among the general public. What is troubling is the absence of a real debate in the Congress, in the media, in the schools and the universities, and in the streets. </p>
<p>
Where are the teach-ins? During the Vietnam War, Americans changed the policies of their government and, in time, changed the government itself through public debate, educational engagement and political action that included mobilization, demonstrations and civil disobedience. Is it because no conscript sons and daughters of the middle class are at risk that the thought of a tide of body bags leaves the progressive movement cold? Or is it because smart weapons will do the job of killing without putting too many Americans at risk?</p>
<p>
There are myriad core questions that have scarcely been asked by the American public (though some have been gently posed in opinion-elite op-eds and congressional hearings). Around such questions a national debate about the future of America in an interdependent world needs to be kindled. </p>
<p>
Policy debates are rooted in reasonable arguments and prudent judgments, not science. There can and will be differences among the goodwilled and fair-minded. But until the hard questions are posed to and debated by the American public and its representatives in the media and the government, until the Bush administration deigns to answer them other than by impugning the patriotism of those who pose them, the country surely cannot afford to enter into a war as risky, potentially costly to ourselves and others, and scarily precedent busting as this one.</p>
<p>
On one thing the president is right: We ought to support vibrant democratic states throughout the world. But perhaps we ought to start (as we do with the fight on terrorism) at home. We've got the USA Patriot Act; we need a USA Citizens' Act. We've got a Department of Homeland Security; now we need a Department of Homeland Democracy. In the 19th century, critics of representation worried that electoral democracy opened up an abyss between a people and their delegates. At the moment of election, the people's representatives started to become distanced from them. By calling this the iron law of oligarchy, they suggested that the process was inevitable.</p>
<p>
Our response must be to make democracy stronger, more engaged and participatory -- especially when it is under siege. This is merely to recognize that democracy starts not with our leaders and representatives and the quality of their administration but with us, with the quality of our citizenship. For my own part, I intend to wear a lapel button that reads "WTPx2!" It'd be my way of saying, "We the people want to participate!" You don't have to be against war to wear it. You only have to be in favor of debate and deliberation first.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 15 Oct 2002 18:19:50 +0000142815 at http://prospect.orgBenjamin BarberGlobalizing Democracyhttp://prospect.org/article/globalizing-democracy
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><font class="nonprinting articlebody">&#13;<br />
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Can globalism be governed? Or, as a first step, can we start by building a global civil society? Until recently, one could look in vain for a global "we, the people" to be represented. That is now changing. There is another internationalism, a forming crystal around which a global polity can grow. Effective global governance to temper the excesses of the global market does not yet exist; however, international activism by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has made some surprising gains. People who care about public goods are working to recreate on a global scale the normal civic balance that exists within democratic nations. Consider the following: &#13;</p>
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<li> A young woman named Jody Williams, with celebrity help from a princess (sadly deceased), creates a worldwide civic movement for a ban on land mines that actually enacts a treaty.&#13;
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</li><li> A Bangladeshi visionary, Mohammed Yunus, develops an idea for microfinancing, which makes mini-loans to women in third world societies, which at once jump-starts enterprise and liberates women from traditional servitude.&#13;
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</li><li> Striking fear into retired tyrants everywhere, European public opinion and spirited English law lords make possible the arrest of a Chilean ex-dictator. Ill health got Pinochet temporarily off the hook, but the Chilean Supreme Court has lifted his immunity and the tocsin has sounded. Dictators are no longer safe in their retirement havens.&#13;
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</li><li> Women's groups from around the world meet in Beijing in a demonstration of international solidarity that asks nothing of national governments and everything of civic institutions that are powerfully reinforced by their actions.&#13;
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</li><li> Multiplying coalitions of workers, environmentalists, students, and anarchists use the Internet to fashion a decentralized, nonideological resistance to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), effectively capturing media attention by taking to the streets in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and London--Prague in the fall is next!&#13;
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</li><li> Citizen groups use "Good Housekeeping seal" methods to underwrite safe fisheries ("dolphin-safe tuna") and rug manufacturers without child labor (Rugmark), while students at Duke University initiate a movement to ensure that campus sports apparel is not manufactured in child-exploiting sweatshops.&#13;
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</li><li> The market-friendly, stealth Multilateral Agreement on Investment that would further erode national attempts to regulate foreign investment is subjected to broad citizen scrutiny and indefinitely deferred.&#13;
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</li><li> Global Internet communication among groups facilitated by organizations like Peter Armstrong's oneworld.org and Globalvision's new mediachannel.org supersite are diverting the new telecommunications from pure commerce to the public interests of global civil society.&#13;
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</li><li> Europe responds as "Europe" to a coalition between Austria's traditional parties and Jörg Haider's reactionary Freedom Party, signaling the potency of an emerging transnational public opinion operating across state boundaries.&#13;
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</li><li> Hundreds of NGOs gather in new international organizations like CIVICUS, the World Forum on Democracy, and Transparency International, and begin to develop the kind of civic networking across nations that corporations have enjoyed for decades, courtesy of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland.&#13;
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</li><li> President Clinton offers the corporate leaders at Davos a "wake-up call" reminding them that there are "new forces seeking to be heard in the global dialogue," progressive forces that want to democratize rather than withdraw from the new world order.&#13;
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&#13;<br /><font color="darkred" size="+2">W</font>hat is afoot here? Davos is a good place to begin. For nearly 30 years, the world's multiplying multinational corporations, transnational banks, and speculators have met every February in the Swiss ski resort to network, strategize, and acquire legitimacy by mixing with invited statesmen and intellectuals. Davos has been a fit symbol for an international arena in which the "three-legged stool" of government, civil society, and the private-market sector on which stable democracies are said to rest has been transformed into a tottering toadstool held up by a thick and solitary economic stem. &#13;</p>
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Markets have escaped the boundaries of eroding national frontiers and become global, but governing organizations have not. This has created a perilous asymmetry: Global economics operate in an anarchic realm without significant regulation and without the humanizing civic institutions that within national societies rescue it from raw social Darwinism. National boundaries have become too porous to hold the economy in, but remain sufficiently rigid to prevent democracy from getting out and civilizing the larger world. We have globalized our economic vices--crime, drugs, terror, hate, pornography, and financial speculation--but not our civic virtues. The result has been a growing tension between the beneficiaries of globalization and just about everyone else, a tension symbolized by the unrest in Seattle last fall, and in Washington, D.C., and London last winter.&#13;</p>
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Yet while it has not yet attracted the attention of the media (inured to good news and preferring to celebrate globalization uncritically and treat resistance to it as Luddism or worse), the new millennium has in fact brought new efforts at overcoming the global imbalance. In June more than a dozen democracies--including not only the center-left regimes led by Bill Clinton, Lionel Jospin, Gerhard Schröder, and Tony Blair, but also South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile--met in Berlin to discuss how they might redress international injustices. A few weeks later, nearly 100 nations met in Warsaw under the somewhat hyperbolic banner of the "community of democracies"--are there really 100 "democracies" in the world? fifty? twenty!?--to seek an even broader consensus for a democratic concert of nations.&#13;</p>
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More to the point, they met for the first time together with a fledgling transnational civil society--a parallel forum supported by Freedom House, Poland's Stefan Batory Foundation, and George Soros (author of a remarkable new critique of globalization called <i>Open Society</i>), with the title World Forum on Democracy. This forum assembled a company of NGOs, foundations, and intellectuals committed to strengthening global civil society; it underscored its novelty by actually holding a joint dinner and several meetings in common with the foreign ministers, who were eventually presented with a document in effect announcing, "Here we are, and we want to be heard." The World Forum plans biennial meetings, with work groups gathering more frequently, but it is by no means the only civil society umbrella group seeking a serious hearing on the global scene.&#13;</p>
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Last fall the National Endowment for Democracy had already convened the first of what were to be a series of global meetings of its own, the next of which will be in São Paulo. Other global civic umbrella groups playing on this turf (finally it is valuable enough to be the venue of turf wars!) include the aforementioned CIVICUS, a group of more than 500 NGOs that has been meeting for a half-dozen years; Transparency International, a German-based civic group focusing on monitoring corruption; and the Aventis Foundation's Triangle Forum on the global future, which met in the middle of July at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center on Long Island for another of a series of trilateral discussions among businesspeople, politicians, NGO representatives, scholars, and (uniquely) artists, including Watermill's creator, Robert Wilson.&#13;</p>
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All this activity suggests we are entering a new era in which global markets and servile governments will no longer be completely alone in planning the world's fate. And just in time. While President Clinton showed at Seattle that he could talk eloquently about civic and human dilemmas of globalism (in a speech that upset his advisers), there has been no meaningful follow-up. On the contrary, with his fast-track legislation (failed) and his opening to China (apparently successful), Clinton is accelerating a headlong rush to global laissez-faire. Likewise Bush and Gore.&#13;</p>
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The asymmetries resulting from the rapid globalization of markets in the absence of any commensurable globalization of political and civic institutions are largely ignored by elected officials, even those of the center-left. Ripped from the box of the nation-state, which traditionally acted as its regulator and civilizer, capitalism turns mean and anarchic. The market sector is privileged; the political sector is largely eclipsed (when not subordinated to the purposes of the market); the private is elevated above the public, which is subjected to ruthless privatization at every turn. Liberty itself is redefined as the absence of governmental authority and hence an exclusively market phenomenon, while coercion and dependency are associated with government even when (especially when) government is democratic.&#13;</p>
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The difficulty nation-states have with globalization comes not just from the force of what is happening in the international arena but from ideological developments within nation-states. The push toward privatization is bipartisan. This is not decentralization--the devolution of power down the democratic public ladder to provinces, municipalities, and neighborhoods--but de-democratization, the shifting of concentrated power at the highest levels from public to private hands. Power shifted from authorities that were hierarchical but also public, transparent, and accountable, to authorities that remain hierarchical but are private, opaque, and undemocratic. &#13;</p>
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In the unfettered high-tech global market, crucial democratic values become relics. Indeed, because globalization is correctly associated with new telecommunication technologies, the globalized and privatized information economy is constructed as an inevitable concomitant of post-sovereign, postmodern society. &#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br /><font color="darkred"><b>Media Concentration Versus Democracy </b></font>&#13;</p>
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Nowhere are the asymmetries of the new globalism more evident than in media mergers like Disney/ABC, Viacom/CBS, Verizon (Bell Atlantic/GTE), and AOL/Time Warner/CNN/EMI. These mergers present a challenge not just to economic competition in the domain of goods, labor, and capital, but to democracy and its defining virtues. These include free and autonomous information (guaranteed by the independent existence of plurally owned media), social and political diversity (guaranteed by genuine pluralism in society), and full participation by citizens in deciding public policies and securing public goods (guaranteed by a robust public domain). When Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996--the first major piece of legislation dealing with new media since the Federal Communications Act of 1934--it effectively ceded the modern information economy to the private forces that control global markets. &#13;</p>
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The new monopolies are particularly insidious because while monopolies of the nineteenth century were in durable goods and natural resources, and exercised control over the goods of the body, new information-age monopolies of the twenty-first century are over news, entertainment, and knowledge, and exercise control over the goods of the mind and spirit. When governments control information and news, we call it totalitarianism; when monopolistic corporations control them, we call it free market strategy.&#13;</p>
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The impact on diversity is misleading because sources of content and information delivery appear to be multiplying. Superficially, this trend is pluralist and empowering. Analysts argue that AOL and Time Warner cover different consumer bases, and the new partners, Steve Case of AOL and Gerald Levin of Time Warner, both promise to pursue "open access" on cable so that the owners of "pipes" that carry content do not become monopoly gatekeepers. But it is hardly clear between AOL and Time Warner who actually represents the pipes and who the content. AOL controls online content but as a Web server is also a monolithic Web portal. Time Warner wanted the deal to get its content on the Web; it is a content provider but, via hard cable installations, also controls pipes. AOL wanted the deal to get its Net services on fast hard-wired cable (it currently depends on snail-speed telephone lines). To suggest there is no real overlap, to suggest there is other than one audience and one information market, is to badly misunderstand the technology and to muddy the real issues of monopoly and globalization in the new information society--as, ironically, the Disney corporation's assault on the merger cogently argues.&#13;</p>
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Indeed, the whole point of "convergence" is to eliminate the features that separate hardware and software, the carriers and the content, until there is a seamless stream of information and entertainment entering your home: one medium, one content, one audience. Telephones, computers, televisions, VCRs, DVDs, video stores, and content companies are the segmented way of the past. The new media company must control them all; in an economy that demands integration and convergence, this means they must control (own) one another.&#13;</p>
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Monopoly is not an accidental outcome but a necessary condition of doing business in this new world. Vertical integration is a condition of synergy. When Bill Gates insists his integration of an Internet portal into his Windows operating system is a "natural" extension of his original product, he is being truthful. But the truth he tells is that convergence means monopoly, and synergy means vertical integration; that a capitalism still defined by real diversity, genuine competition, differential markets, and multiple firms is an anachronism--these are practices of the industrial past that have no place in the postindustrial information-economy future.&#13;</p>
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Now this may all represent a new and powerful logic of an information economy that dictates its own imperatives. But no one has spent much time trying to think about how this new economic logic in which private monopoly is a public good impacts the traditional logic of the democratic society, which holds that private monopoly is a public bad. There were good reasons for thinking that many newspapers and magazines were better than a few when the founders wrote the First Amendment. There were good reasons for thinking that broadcast media were public utilities over which the public had special claims when legislators wrote the Federal Communications Act of 1934. There were good reasons for thinking that diversity of content and pluralism of culture were integral virtues of a democratic society when America embraced multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s. &#13;</p>
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Does a change in private technological and economic logic mean that the public logic of democracy must accommodate itself uncomplainingly to that change? Or is it technology and the information economy that need to be reassessed and revised to meet our public goals and common goods as a democratic people? Should private logic dominate public logic in democracy? Are Steve Case, Gerald Levin, and Ted Turner appropriate unelected representatives to shape America's destiny as an information society? Will their decisions become de facto legislation for the rest of the world? These troublesome questions cannot be answered in the context of national politics. The real challenge is whether we can address the erosion of democracy in the asymmetrical setting of global markets, where such civic and political tools as are available to us within nations have gone missing.&#13;</p>
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Yet the outlook is not quite so pessimistic as the diagnosis suggests. Why? Because there is an emerging international alternative to global markets in new transnational civic organizations and social movements, and there are still political strategies that can oppose privatization within nations and then help nation-states reassert control over the global economy through traditional "concert of nations" approaches. After all, the IMF and the WTO are not supranational organizations, but the tools of groups of powerful nations. They will bend to the will of democratic governments, if leading governments can once again represent the public interests of their sovereign peoples and can find ways to cooperate.&#13;</p>
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<p>The marketplace functions effectively within nation-states because it is only one of three sectors. The private-business sector is not only balanced by the public-government sector, but the two are in turn mediated by a civil society that, like government, is public and composed of communities and other collective associations, but like the market is voluntary and free. Within nation-states, it is not the market alone but this stable tripod of governmental, civic, and private institutions that generates liberty and produces the pluralistic goods of free society. Rip the market from its nesting place in nation-states, however, and you have wild capitalism--wild not in itself (it is supposed to be aggressively competitive) but because in globalizing it slips the civilizing embrace of its nation-state hosts.&#13;</p>
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The turmoil in Seattle at the end of last year and in Washington, D.C., and London in the winter and spring arose from frustration. The protectionist backlash bespeaks a deep insecurity in the face of a world out of control--an exaggerated nightmare of a world in which American soldiers serve under foreign command, Islamic fundamentalists conspire to wage terror on the American heartland, jobs hemorrhage abroad, immigrants inundate the nation and rend its fragile unity. Far from suggesting common cause between American protestors and the wretched of the earth elsewhere, however, this backlash can look like an American version of Jörg Haider's politics of fear. As Egypt's Economy Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali said, "The world is not represented on the streets of Seattle. The truth is, most of the world's population was inside the conference in Seattle, not outside." &#13;</p>
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Yet the democratic world really is out of control because the instruments of benign control--democratic governing institutions--simply do not exist in the international setting, where markets in currency, labor, and goods run like engines without governors. Happily, the rising internationalism of transnational civic institutions and social movements promises a measure of countervailing power in the international arena and serves as an alternative to the reactionary politics of Pat Buchanan or Jean-Marie Le Pen. &#13;</p>
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These civic efforts--the work of citizens rather than governments, or the work of governments reacting to citizens (and not just their own)--embody a global public opinion in the making, a global civic engagement that can alone give the abstraction of international politics weight. The outreach of citizens and civic groups can make entities like "Europe" more than a mere function of economic and security concerns. Coteries of NGOs, the shifting voice of global public opinion, and the emergent hand of the international rights movement may not be the equal of multinational corporations or international banks, but they represent a significant starting place for countervailing power. They put flesh on the bare bones of legalistic doctrines of universal rights. James Madison noted that a declaration of rights is a paper fortress from which it is impossible to defend real rights. Rights depend on engaged citizens and a civic space where their activities are possible. These new transnational civic spaces offer possibilities for transnational citizenship and hence an anchor for global rights.&#13;</p>
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<p>Even so, these transnational civic projects should not fool us into thinking that Amnesty International or Médecins Sans Frontières are the equivalent in clout of AOL Time Warner or the IMF. International markets spin out of control not just because the economy has been globalized, but because, nation by nation by nation, we have conspired in the transfer of sovereignty from popular hands that are transparent and accountable to private hands that are neither. We remain transfixed by privatization on the Thatcher/Reagan/Blair/ Clinton model, and so we are unable to avail ourselves of the many potential control mechanisms already in place. We bemoan the absence of governance and international regulation over free markets, though in truth the international institutions most often vilified are ultimately instruments of sovereign nations acting in concert. Their subservience to multinational corporations and powerful banking and financial interests reflects not just some historically inevitable erosion of sovereignty but the willed sellout of sovereign peoples to the myths of privatization. As international civil society grows stronger, it can become a source of countervailing democratic pressure on national governments.&#13;</p>
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Technically, like the United Nations, the WTO is itself a creature of nation-states. Like the IMF and many other market institutions, it could be regarded as the exoskeleton of international governance. But privatization--globalization's nasty twin--has robbed the nations that nominally control it of their democratic will, and they appear to be servants rather than masters of the new global corporate sovereigns. With animals running the zoo, those who seek such public goods as environmental protection, transparency, accountability, labor safety, and the protection of children look in vain for keepers and finally settle for theatrics, raising a ruckus rather than effecting a change.&#13;</p>
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Were they to agree on policy, the leading industrial nations could probably work their will at the IMF and the WTO. Ironically, although global markets do erode national sovereignty, a reassertion of national sovereignty as a consequence of domestic political campaigns aimed at challenging privatization could go a long way toward controlling global markets. Currently, the WTO treats national "boycotts" of imported goods, even when they are motivated by legitimate safety or environmental or child-labor concerns, as illegal. Its members can change these provisions. Third world nations worry with reason that first world environmental and safety and minimum wage concerns are a way of putting a human face on protectionism. By imposing impossible-to-meet standards, the United States can win back jobs from developing nations. But if first world governments agreed to pay the price of meeting those standards, they would win the support of third world governments in regulating global capitalism and improving standards worldwide.&#13;</p>
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National sovereignty is said to be a dying concept, but it is a long way from dead. Sovereign nations remain the locus of democratic society and the only viable powers capable of opposing, subduing, and civilizing the anarchic forces of the global economy. International civil society, the emerging global alternative to world markets, needs the active support of sovereign states for its fragile new institutions to have even a modest impact. Working together as they began to in Berlin and Warsaw in June, progressive forces within the democracies can increase the voice of civil society in how the world is organized and governed--but only if citizens and the new president they elect in November begin to listen to that voice in earnest. ¤&#13;<br />
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</center></li></div></div></div>Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:11:45 +0000141730 at http://prospect.orgBenjamin BarberThe Reconstruction of Rightshttp://prospect.org/article/reconstruction-rights
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>If there is a single theme upon which Americans agree, it is that ours is a regime rooted in rights. Rights are how we enter our political conversation: the chips with which we bargain, the collateral in the social contract. They are the ground of both rebellion and legitimacy, of our inclinations to anarchism and our proclivities towards community. Without coaching, any American will cry out:</p>
<p>"I know my rights!" or</p>
<p>"You got no right!" or</p>
<p>"What about my rights?" or</p>
<p>"Read him his rights!"</p>
<p>Corporations mimic individuals in their devotion to rights as barriers against the public regulation of private profit. The Philip Morris Company recently paid the National Archives $600,000 to associate itself with the Bill of Rights, presumably to promote its view of advertising as a First Amendment right essential to selling tobacco in an age of democratic public health advocacy. Rights are how Americans have always advanced their interests, whether as individual or corporate persons. Some might say (I will do so below) that there is even an element of obsession in the American devotion to rights, that we sometimes risk a rights absolutism as unbalanced in its political effects as the fabled "tyranny of the majority" against which rights are often deployed as the primary defense.</p>
<p>Yet there are good reasons for the focus on rights. The naked self comes to the bargaining table weak and puny; the language of rights clothes it. The naked self extends hardly beyond that bundle of desires and aversions that constitute its raw, pre-legitimate wants. Rights carve out a space for it to operate in -- call it autonomy or dignity or, in its material incarnation, property. Wants become needs and needs acquire a moral mantle that, as rights claims, cannot be ignored. The hungry man wants to eat; the ravenous man needs to eat; the starving man has a right to eat. Rights turn the facts of want into powerful claims -- powerful, at least, in civil societies that consider rights rhetoric legitimate.</p>
<p>Even the naked self is perforce a social self, whose claims on others imply reciprocity as well as equality. If, as this suggests, democracy is the form of governance especially suited to the language of rights, it is ironic and troubling to find the language of rights often deployed in a fashion adversarial to democracy. Perhaps this is because democracy is often understood as the rule of the majority, and rights are understood more and more as the private possessions of individuals and thus as necessarily antagonistic to majoritarian democracy. But, as I will suggest, this is to misunderstand both rights and democracy.</p>
<p><font class="headline">The Roots of Rights</font><br />America has always been a civil society hospitable to rights. It borrowed its earliest norms from diverse roots: from Puritanism, with its egalitarian version of the rights of a Christian; from the English Dissent tradition, which conceived of rights as a bastion against illegitimate monarchic authority; and from classical republicanism (James Harrington or Montesquieu, for example), where rights were linked to civic virtue and constitutional government. Even in colonial times, American institutions treated government as an artificial contrivance which had to be created; a collectivity to be sure but one instrumental to the religious and secular interests of individuals; one that saw government as originating in consensus and in a contract between all those who were to be citizens or subjects. The Mayflower Compact for example, though scarcely a document concerned with natural rights, saw the Pilgrims "covenant and combine" themselves "together into a civil body politick, for (their) better order and preservation."</p>
<p>But just how democratic was this society, hospitable as it was to rights, or how democratic could it become? The question offers one way of considering whether rights and democracy can cohabit or perhaps even reinforce one another.</p>
<p>On the face of things, and in keeping with the eighteenth-century view, the answer would seem to be not very democratic, at least not at the outset. In the great Founders' debate, both Federalists concerned with strong central government and the sovereignty of the whole over the parts, and Anti-Federalists concerned with the relative autonomy of the states and the sovereignty of the parts over the whole, shared one thing: they both understood the Constitution as a tool of rights. Federalists saw in its governmental powers the explicit political expression of rights; anti-Federalists saw in its provisions a set of rights limiting governmental power.</p>
<p>Historically, these standpoints were both complementary and in tension in just the same way as the social contract theories of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were complementary and in tension. Hobbes sought to protect individual liberty and security <i>through</i> strong government; Locke wanted to protect liberty and property <i>against</i> strong government. In the Federalist case, there is a Hobbesian faith in strong contract-based government as a guarantor of rights; in the Anti-Federalist case, there is a Lockean distrust of strong government which understands rights as constraints on government. Both positions conceive of government as an artificial means whose primary object is the preservation of rights that are anterior to politics -- that exist in a "natural" or "higher" pre-political form.</p>
<p> </p>
<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>Returning to our question, then, the terms of the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate would suggest that the American rights tradition in both its Federalist and Anti-Federalist forms had a primarily anti-democratic bias. For the Federalists, the issue was how to insulate the power in which rights were expressed and by which liberty and property were to be safeguarded from popular majorities and private opinion. Madison warned against "an infinity of little jealous clashing commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord" and essayed to design a constitution that would supply republican remedies to treat republican vices (among which democracy was paramount!). These included indirect election of representatives and an expanded compass for civil society; by multiplying the number of factions and groups, their capacity for divisiveness might be attenuated.</p>
<p>For the Anti-Federalists, the aim was to limit government <i>tout court</i>. Despite the democratic spirit of the strategy favored by Jefferson calling for the devolution of power, the object remained to check and limit central power as the exercise of a unitary popular sovereignty. Here the Bill of Rights figured as a studied obstacle to centrally organized popular power. Locke had worried about how "polecats and foxes" (ordinary men, quarrelsome and contentious) might protect themselves from the sovereign lion brought in to police their disputes. The Federalists wanted to keep the "people" from riding the lion, believing that only the best men could subdue its power and divert it to their virtuous ends; the Anti-Federalists were less concerned with the rider, hoping rather to imprison the lion itself in a cage of rights. Neither had much trust in the people from whom popular government took its legitimacy. Hamilton is said to have expressly calumnized the people as a great beast, "howling masses" not fit to govern.</p>
<p>Thus, it is hardly a surprise that the Founders managed to create a form of government in many ways antipathetical to any real institutional expression of the popular sovereignty that was its paper premise. Moreover, they wrote a constitution whose letter was self-consciously distrustful of democracy. Popular sovereignty could not for them mean popular rule. The abstract status of sovereign permitted "we the people" to establish a government, but did not license it to participate in the government it had brought forth.</p>
<p>The word "equality" failed to make an appearance in the Constitution's language, and almost every device of government contemplated was aimed not at embodying but at checking popular power. The real democrats (Sam Adams, Patrick Henry, Tom Paine, Jefferson himself) were not present at the Philadelphia Creation, and radical democratic models calling for a unicameral legislature and universal white male suffrage of the kind represented by the Pennsylvania Constitution were given short shrift.</p>
<p>Jefferson had written of the Virginia Constitution: Try by this as a tally every provision of our constitution and see if it hangs directly on the will of the people." By this measure, the federal Constitution failed -- and thus, for the suspicious Founders, succeeded. As Patrick Henry had dryly remarked, as far as he could see the people gave them [the Founders] no power to use their names. Such incipient tendencies to popular government as "democrats, mobocrats and all the other rats," as the slogan had it, might have insinuated into the Constitution were unlikely to survive that document's institutional arrangements. These included the separation of powers with its immobilizing checks and balances, federalism as a forced vertical separation of powers enhanced by the Tenth Amendment, the indirect election of senators and the President which interposed a filter between the people and their servants, judicial review as a check on popular legislation (and in time a warrant for judicial legislation), and the division of popular will into two parts equal and opposed -- one represented by the House of Representatives, the other by the presidency.</p>
<p>The two expressly democratic instruments -- the House of Representatives and the Amendment Article -- were hedged in with restrictions. Limitations on suffrage (standards were a matter for the states to decide at their own discretion within the loose confines of republicanism) left it, in Henry Lee's scathing indictment, "a mere shred or rag of representation." The powers to amend the Constitution detailed in Article V were popular sovereignty's most potent constitutional instrument. But they were made sufficiently complicated and unwieldy to turn the amendment provision into a last and improbable recourse of what would have to be, if they really were going to use it, a wildly dissatisfied and endlessly energetic people. Sixteen amendments in 200 years (I count the Bill of Rights as part of the original Constitution) does not suggest a very democratic instrument or a very engaged popular sovereign.</p>
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<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>And yet the letter of the Constitution and the intentions of the Framers are only part of the story. America's spirit of democracy is older than the republic. Equality had its ardent advocates then as now, and even where it was contradicted by the Constitution's letter, the democratic spirit found its way into the tenor and the logic of the Constitution. This spirit arises not in opposition to rights but from the political context that gives rights meaning and force.</p>
<p>There is a simple but powerful relationship between rights and democracy: universal rights logically require equality. Rights, as political philosophers say, "entail" the equality of those who claim them; and democracy is the politics of equality. Without democracy, rights are empty words, dependent for their realization on the good will of despots. Rights in their own turn promote and promise emancipation, suffrage, and empowerment. Even Madison recognized that rights without supporting political institutions were so many "parchment barriers" to tyranny (one reason for his early opposition to a separate Bill of Rights). Late in his life (in 1821), like so many Americans who had once feared the people as a rabble, he had come to take a less harsh view of democracy. He would not perhaps have agreed with Louis Hartz that "the majority in America has forever been a puppy dog tethered to a lion's leash," but on the question of the enfranchising of the propertyless, he came to acknowledge, "Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the Mass of Citizens should not be without a voice, in making the laws which they are to obey, in choosing the Magistrates, who are to administer them, and if the only alternative be between an equal and universal right of suffrage for each branch of the government and a containment of the entire right to a part of the citizens, it is better that those having the greater interest at stake namely that of property and persons both, should be deprived of half their share in government; then that those having the lesser interest, that of personal rights only, should be deprived of the whole."</p>
<p>Madison's use of the language of "an equal and universal right of suffrage" just thirty years after a Founding consecrated to limiting both popular suffrage and popular access to government seems startling, but rights language permitted no other evolution. If popular government and laws understood as self-prescribed limitations on private behavior are the real guarantors of liberty, if natural rights are secure only when political rights are guaranteed by popular government, then the right to suffrage turns out to be the keystone of all other rights -- a principle increasingly recognized in the real democratic politics of the early nineteenth century and one eventually written explicitly into the Constitution with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.</p>
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<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>I mean here to advance both a logical claim and a historical claim. I want to say rights can be shown theoretically to entail equality and democracy. And at the same time, I want to argue that the actual history of rights talk in America unfolds as an increasingly progressive and democratic story. Philosophically, rights claims are always and necessarily equality claims as well. To say I have a right is to posit that I am the equal of others and at the same time to recognize the equality of the persons to whom, on whom, against whom the claim is made. No master ever said to a slave: "Give me my rights!" for rights can be acknowledged only by equals. Likewise, the slave who proclaims "I have the right to be free" says in the same breath "I am your equal," and hence "you are my equal." In a certain sense, in speaking of equal rights one speaks redundantly: rights are equalizers. Individuals may use rights to insulate themselves from others, to wall in their privacy, but their rights claims depend entirely on the proposition that as claimants they are the equal of all others, that no one living in a free and democratic society is privileged because of who they happen to be by virtue of race, gender, religion, and so forth.</p>
<p>More than anything else, this is why a constitution rooted in rights cannot systematically exclude whole classes of persons from citizenship without becoming inherently incoherent and thus unstable. Even where it is anti-democratic in its institutional provisions, it will incline to democratization, tend over time towards greater inclusiveness. This is exactly what happened to the American polity in the course of the nineteenth century. That the Constitution included provisions implicitly recognizing slavery (the three-fifths compromise for example) was a shameful comment on the Founders and perhaps on their motives. Nonetheless, such provisions sat like undigested gruel on the Constitution's rights-lined stomach and were in time regurgitated. This resulted not simply from pressures brought to bear from the outside, but arose from the inherently universalizing character of all rights talk, which pushes against artificial boundaries of every kind and makes inequalities increasingly indigestible.</p>
<p>If rights imply citizenship and citizenship appears as a right -- the right to liberty, the right to self-legislation, the right to be included in a civic polity founded on "popular" (that-means-me!) sovereignty -- the idea of the citizen will always have an aggressive, liberating, even imperial character, pushing to extend its compass to the very periphery of the universal. In Rome, early modern Europe, and America, it has been expansive in its logic and liberating in its politics. Today as rights continue to press outward, reaching the very edge of our species boundary, we can even speak of "animal rights" or "fetal rights" and still seem to be extending rather than perverting what it means for beings to have rights.</p>
<p>Rights are also linked logically to democracy and equality as a consequence of their essentially social character. Rousseau had already observed in <i>The Social Contract</i> that though all justice comes from God, "if we knew how to receive it from on high, we would need neither government nor laws. There is without a doubt a universal justice emanating from reason alone; but to be acknowledged among us, this justice must be reciprocal. . . . there must be conventions and laws to combine rights with duties and to bring justice back to its object." In a classical nineteenth-century idealist argument, the English political philosopher T.H. Green elaborates Rousseau's argument by insisting "there can be no right without a consciousness of common interest on the part of members of a society. Without this there might be certain powers on the part of individuals, but no recognition of these powers... and without this recognition or claim to recognition there can be no right." Recognition entails the mutuality of a common language, common conventions, and common consciousness: in other words, civility. Citizens alone possess rights, for as Green said, rights "attach to the individual... only as a member of a society." Tocqueville is, of course, right to remind us that citizens united as a majority are still capable of abusing the rights of citizens taken one by one. But Green's rejoinder is that the tyranny of the majority may be more a reflection on the inadequacies of democratic processes than the absence of rights.</p>
<p><font class="headline">Democracy as the Realm of Rights </font><br />Now if rights entail equality and require a civic context of mutual recognition to be effective, the regime form most compatible with rights is neither decentralized, limited government on the model of the Anti-Federalists, nor screened and filtered representative government on the republican model of the Federalists, but quite simply democracy-- defined by universal suffrage and collective self-legislation. For democracy is the rule of equality. Limited government is indifferent to who rules so long as the rulers are constrained. Republican government elicits the consent and accountability but not the participation and judgment of the people, which is why Jefferson sometimes called representative government elective aristocracy. Rights do best, however, where those who claim them are one and the same with those upon whom the claims fall -- where sovereign and subject are united in one person: a citizen. Without citizenship and participation, rights can become a charade. Without responsibility, rights may not always be enforceable. Without empowerment, rights can seem like decorative fictions. A constitution is, after all, a piece of paper, and "parchment barriers" are never much use against lead and steel and chains and guns, although they can be a significant trip-wire against majority assaults on minorities, something the Founders obviously appreciated.</p>
<p>In what may be the world's most effusively rights-oriented constitution, a famous document not only guarantees citizens "freedom of speech," "freedom of the press," "freedom of assembly," and "freedom of street processions and demonstrations," but also offers judges who will be constitutionally "independent and subject only to the law," "separation of church from state," as well as the "right to education," "the right to work," "the right to rest and leisure," "the right to maintenance in old age and also in case of sickness or disability," and, as if these were not enough, equal rights to women "in all spheres of economic, government, cultural, political and other public activity," and finally, guaranteeing what comes before, universal elections in which all citizens have the right to vote, "irrespective of race or nationality, sex, religion, education, domicile, social origin, property status or past activities." This unprecedented fortress of human liberty is the Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Soviet Union, a nation in which rights have been paper parapets from which no defense of liberties can be undertaken.</p>
<p>As Madison observed in questioning the value of a Bill of Rights detached from the Constitution, "Repeated violations of ... parchment barriers have been committed by overbearing majorities in every state.... Whenever there is an interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done and not less readily by a powerful and interested party than by a powerful and interested prince.</p>
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<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>Philosophical argument finds persuasive historical expression in the American setting. Successful popular movements aimed at the emancipation of slaves, the enfranchisement of women, and the remediation of the condition of the native American Indian tribes, as well as the empowerment of the poor, the working class, and others cast aside by the American market, have all had in common a devotion to the language of rights. Indeed, the single most important strategic decision faced by those who felt left out of the American way of life has been whether to mobilize against or in the name of the American Founding, understood as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Movements that have made war on the Constitution, holding that its rights promise no salvation to the powerless, have on the whole failed. Movements that have insisted that the Founding can and must make good on the promise implicit in its universalizing rights rhetoric have succeeded.</p>
<p>In their explicit mimicry of the Founders' language and the citation of great rights jurists like Blackstone, the bold women at Seneca Falls in 1846 captured the logic of "entailment" with their own militant rights claims. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," they asserted, "that all men and women are created equal." And although the radical abolitionists at times seemed to declare war on America itself, one of their most fiery leaders understood the entailments of the American tradition well enough. William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution in Framingham on July 4,1854, but he nevertheless declared in <i>The Liberator</i>, in his <i>To the Public</i>, and in impassioned speeches throughout the North, that he "assented to the 'self-evident truth' maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, 'that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights -- among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'" On this foundation, he concluded, he would "strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population."</p>
<p>Some might say these radicals were trying to drive a wedge between the Declaration and the Constitution, but when John Brown went looking for legitimacy he found it in the Preamble to the Constitution as well as in the Declaration. When he offered the People of the United States a "Provisional Constitution," its preamble read: "Whereas slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion. . . in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence, therefore we, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people (deprived of Rights by Justice Taney)... do ordain and establish for ourselves the following Provisional Constitution and ordinances, the better to protect our person, property, lives and liberties, and to govern our action."</p>
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<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>From this perspective, the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments ending slavery and involuntary servitude and guaranteeing universal male suffrage, due process, and the equal protection of the laws to all citizens were not a reversal of America's constitutional history but the culminating event in the history of the Constitution's rights commitments as they manifested themselves in the practical politics and civic life of the nation. Justice Taney's decision in <i>Dred Scott</i> was, by the same token, the last gasp of those trying to stem the floodtide on which rights were sweeping through history. Taney's problem was how to construct rights whose thrust was ineluctably universalizing in narrow, self-limiting terms appropriate to his prejudices. He had to show that "we the people," synonymous with "citizens," could somehow be construed to exclude the Negro race. His decision tortuously avoids the entailments of the idea of citizenship and instead turns on the "historical fact" that Negroes "were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings." Taney takes care to avoid a careful examination of what such crucial terms as "person," "citizen," and "right" might entail. For it was precisely against those entailments that he was rather desperately trying to construct an argument.</p>
<p>Even at the time of the Founding there had been powerful opposition to slavery as an embarrassment to the language of the Declaration and the Constitution's Preamble. John Adams and John Jay were vigorously eloquent in their opposition to it (although not at the Convention), and there were a number of statesmen who would sympathize with George Mason's refusal to sign the Constitution because its twenty-year extension of the slave trade was "disgraceful to mankind."</p>
<p>Madison had acknowledged "moral equality of blacks" and in <i>Federalist No. 54</i> had allowed that Negroes did "partake" of qualities belonging to persons as well as to property and were thus protected in "life and limb, against the violence of all others." The slave, Madison said elsewhere, "is no less evidently regarded by the law as a member of the society, not as part of irrational creation; as a moral person, not as a mere article of property." It was not so much the moral argument but the logic of what it meant to be a person that is captured by Madison, and it was this logic that created the problems for the hapless Taney.</p>
<p><font class="headline">Are Rights Eroding Democracy?</font><br />In our century, the powerful alliance between rights and political emancipation, between the claim to be a person and the right to be a citizen, seems in danger of coming unstuck. Increasingly, rights have retreated into the private space won for them by their civic entailments, allowing us to forget that they are secured by and only have meaning for citizens. The communities rights once created are now too often pictured as the enemies of right and the political institutions by which we secure rights are made over into external and alien adversaries -- as if they had nothing to do with us. The sense of rights as a claim for political participation, and participation and civic responsibility as the foundation of rights, has yielded to peculiarly privatized notions of rights as indisputable possessions of individuals who acquire them by birth or membership in some special subgroup, and must do nothing to enforce them. Such rights exist and are efficacious as long as they are noisily promulgated.</p>
<p>There are multiple reasons for the new take on rights, many of which have little to do with the logic of rights itself and for which rights advocates cannot be blamed. The erosion of viable notions of the public and of a common good and the growth of interest-group liberalism in which private factions and their rights come to count as the only political entities worthy of attention has undermined citizenship and the public rights associated with it. Under conditions of privatization, consumerism, radical individualism, and cultural separatism, rights cease to be regarded as a civic identity to be posited and won, and are instead conceived as a natural identity to be discovered, worn, and enjoyed.</p>
<p>As a consequence, young people are more likely to use rights to make a case about what government owes them than to point to what they themselves might owe to the democratic government that is the guarantor of their rights ("Ask not what your country can do for you ..."). Thus, for example, they may exclaim that the government has "no right" to conscript them into the army, as if it were not their government, as if there could be a democratic government in the absence of their willingness and responsibility to service it -- quite literally to constitute it. Many young persons in fact do engage in community service or enlist in the armed services or participate in demonstrations and protests, but as often as not these activities are either seen as "voluntary" (it is a "volunteer army") or as a manifestation of rights and prerogatives held against government and the polity. Civic duties and social responsibilities simply do not come into it.</p>
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<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>The changing climate of politics is evident in the vanishing of volunteer fire departments for want of volunteers, and in the growing ungovernability of municipalities that cannot afford liability insurance against disgruntled inhabitants who conceive themselves as dissatisfied clients rather than as responsible citizens. Fire protection comes to be viewed as a service provided by government to residents rather than a service by, for and of citizens. Where Our Town becomes Their Town, rights can become a knife that severs the bonds of citizens rather than the glue that holds it together. The right to sue is a precious resource against abusive authority; yet democratic responsibility is also a powerful guarantee against abuse. We need both. The litigious citizen expresses his rights as an individual but may be overlooking his responsibilities to the community being sued.</p>
<p>The precarious balance between individual and community which rights properly understood can mediate is upset, and rights are introduced on only one side of the scales, leaving the community hard pressed to advance the public good. Legal philosophers like to say that rights are trumps, which is a poignant way of underscoring the crucial subjugation of democratic government to the liberties of citizens. But there is also a sense in which, as Rousseau once wrote, citizens are trumps: "There can be no patriotism without liberty," Rousseau observes, "no liberty without virtue, no virtue without citizens; create citizens and you will have everything you need; without them you will have nothing but debased slaves from the rulers of the state on downwards."</p>
<p>Rights, after all, belong to individuals as citizens, and citizens belong to communities that therefore also have rights. There is no reason not to use the power of rights as legitimizers of claims in order to advance community goods. Tenants organizing against drug traffickers, victims organizing to secure their rights in a criminal justice system disposed (quite properly) to pay special attention to the rights of criminal defendants, and mothers organizing against drunk drivers (MADD) offer compelling examples of the power of rights-thinking on behalf of the community at large.</p>
<p>The American Civil Liberties Union has been an ardent and valuable advocate of the rights of individuals in our democracy. Yet the ACLU's conception of rights has occasionally veered towards a denial of community that may reflect the breakdown of our sense of common civic purposes as a nation. In recent years, in addition to its healthy concerns with the sanctity of political speech and the right of assembly (both of which are important to the polity and the public good), the ACLU has dug itself into a foxhole from which it can engage in a firefight with democracy. The ACLU has opposed airport security examinations, decried sobriety checkpoints (recently declared constitutional by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision), argued against the voluntary fingerprinting of children in areas subject to kidnapping. By making privacy over into a supertrump card in a deck of individual rights that, with respect both to public goods and community rights, is already trump to start with, it places at risk the balance between individual and community that is the prize achievement of the history of rights in America.</p>
<p>In the case of the <i>Michigan Department of State Police v. Sitz</i>, a leading argument held that sobriety checkpoints abridged the constitutional rights of Michigan motorists by causing them "fright and surprise" in the course of ninety-second stops that were tantamount to "subjective intrusion upon liberty interests." The liberty interests of other drivers as potential victims of drunken driving usually thought of as belonging to the rights of the community, or the responsibility of the body politic, were not weighed and found wanting; they were ignored. This is a growing problem in a society where the idea of civic community has lost its resonance and interest groups such as the National Rifle Association use rights as a foil for their special pleading.</p>
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<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>This unbalancing of the rights equation feeds into the historical mistrust some Americans still feel towards popular government. It threatens to disenfranchise the very citizenry rights were once deployed to empower. The new strategy links a Federalist distrust of popular rule with a form of judicial activism that permits courts not merely to enforce rights but to legislate in their name whenever the "people" are deemed sufficiently deluded or insufficiently energetic. It is not at all clear that rights enforced on an obstinate citizen body rendered passive-aggressive (quiescent but angry) by an encroaching court are really made more secure over the long haul. But it certainly is clear that a "democratic" government that will not permit its citizens to govern themselves when it comes to rights will soon be without either rights or democracy.</p>
<p>It was, of course, an original Federalist strategy aimed at curbing democracy that produced judicial review as a limit on popular legislation. In the Madisonian approach to the balance of power, the judiciary has remained a key instrument in preventing majorities from getting out of hand. Yet as Louis Hartz noticed, the majority has not really gotten out of hand very often in America. Tolerance notwithstanding, at least since <i>Brown v. Board of Education</i> (1954), impatient democrats seeking to secure rights that majorities sometimes neglected have allied themselves with courts willing to act as surrogate legislators where the people are found wanting. The "filtration" of the public mind favored by the Founders thus has found a modem incarnation in the not so democratic practices of judicial government.</p>
<p>In the recent Supreme Court case upholding a lower court decision concerning Kansas City (Missouri) school desegregation, the majority ruled in favor of a judicial intervention whose final outcome was the raising of taxes. The case is complicated, and the Missouri court did not itself directly levy taxes, but Justice Anthony Kennedy issued a sobering caution about the logic of the judiciary acting as legislative surrogate when he wrote in dissent: "It is not surprising that imposition of taxes by a [judicial] authority so insulated from public communication or control can lead to deep feelings of frustration, powerlessness and anger on the part of taxpaying citizens." Frustration, powerlessness, and anger have become the currency in which many Americans have paid for the usurping of their political authority in the name of their political rights. Americans need their rights, but they need also to understand the responsibilities their rights entail. If seen solely as private things to be secured by judges rather than public things (<i>res publica</i>) to be secured by citizens, rights atrophy.</p>
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<p></p><center>* * *</center>
<p>Democracies do not always do justice. Frequently they do injustice. Yet the remedy for this, as Jefferson noted a long time ago, is not to disempower citizens who have been indiscreet, but to inform their discretion, which may sometimes mean extending rather than circumscribing their power. For power teaches responsibility and responsibility limits power. Like experienced legislators, publics can and do become more discreet and competent over time. The ravages done by Proposition 13 (which initiated the tax revolt in 1978, limiting state expenditures) have gradually educated the people of California into an appreciation of their civic responsibilities. In the spring of 1990, quite on their own, and without the mandate of a court, they approved a referendum raising taxes. What America most needs just now are not more interventionist courts but more interventionist schools; not lessons in the rights of private persons but lessons in the responsibilities of public citizens; not a new view of the Bill of Rights, but a new view of the Constitution as the democratic source of all rights.</p>
<p>Madison might have had a better understanding of rights than the advocates of a separate Bill of Amendments when he argued for including rights in the substantive text of the constitution. For by placing them there, where they would be read in context rather than isolating them in a document that might make them seem a natural possession of passive private persons, their civic and social nature as part and parcel of the fabric of democratic republicanism might have been crystal clear.</p>
<p>On this two hundredth birthday of the Bill of Rights, we need to learn for ourselves what the first 75 years of American history, culminating in the Civil War, taught our ancestors in a still young America: that rights stand with, not against, democracy and if the two do not progress together, they do not progress at all.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 05 Dec 2000 02:51:49 +0000141612 at http://prospect.orgBenjamin Barber